BATON ROUGE — Two days after his team’s season-opening 58-0 win over Division I-AA Western Carolina, LSU head coach Nick Saban addressed the media on Monday afternoon concerning this week’s opponent, the Houston Cougars.
Saban’s Tigers (1-0) will practice this afternoon at the LSU Practice Facility.
Tickets to Saturday night’s game are still available online here on LSUsports.net, or by calling the LSU Ticket Office at 225-388-2184. The game begins at 7 p.m. in Tiger Stadium.
Please look for complete GameDay coverage throughout the week on LSUsports.net, followed by the LIVE audio from the game beginning at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday.
QUOTES FROM LSU HEAD FOOTBALL COACH NICK SABAN
“The thing that we were most impressed with about our team in the last game? was that as I watched the film, no matter at what point in the game it was,? we played beyond the scoreboard. I could not tell by watching the film what? the score of the game was. That was our goal, it was what we wanted to get accomplished by our team, and that was to have a game both on the scoreboard and a game on the field. The game on the field was to play tough for 60 minutes, whether it meant special teams, offense, or defense. We accomplished that and that’s good.”
“In doing that of course there are some technical things that we can improve on. We talked about the penalties. Some of those penalties were not in good judgement. Some were due to a lack of discipline, and those are things that we need to improve on. We had some mental errors on both sides of the ball and in the kicking game. It would have hurt us if we were playing a really good football team.”
“I think our players need to have the disposition that we need to look at every one of those things and make the most improvement that we can make. They need to realize that the consequences of those mistakes could have been a lot worse. We need to have a positive attitude about trying to get better.”
“That is going to be our whole emphasis and what we try to do this week, but the most important thing I felt was that we got the kind of effort and toughness that we wanted. We played together as a team.? We had a lot of the guys stay in the game even when they weren’t in the game to help the other players play well. I was very pleased that I couldn’t tell what the score was by how we were out there performing.”
“We had a couple guys that I think had some outstanding performances. I think we had more guys probably than some of you recognized, but you can see how well some of those guys performed statistically and the kinds of plays they made.? I don’t think in some cases the players had many opportunities to make plays in this game because of the positions that they were put in relative to the situation in the game and the number of plays they had the opportunity to play.”
“Both of the quarterbacks need to play with the kind of precision, decision making and judgement that they made in Saturday’s game. Both guys deserve the opportunity to be nominated for player of the week.? We’ll have both quarterbacks who we’ll nominate as players of the week for their performance relative to the time that they played.”
“Trev Faulk was the leading tackler on defense even though he only played a little more than half of the game. He had great intensity and leadership, and he played with a lot of toughness and he executed the blitz. We didn’t have a guy on defense that had a tremendous number of production points. Production points are good plays during the game, like tackles for a loss, a forced fumble, interception, sacks, and all those types of plays.”
“We didn’t have a lot of defensive plays and we didn’t have many individuals play many plays, so they didn’t get the opportunity to accumulate a great amount of power points. Hopefully we’ll be able to get more points out of some of our big play people on defense. Trev did a great job while he was in the game.”
“Elice Parker did a fantastic job on special teams. He had three tackles, including a kickoff inside the twenty. He played with outstanding effort, and he did his job on all of the special teams.”
“Injuries are minimal going into this week. We have maybe two guys who are questionable going into this week’s practice. I don’t think we have anybody that is out for the game. Brandon Winey and Terrance O’Bryant will not practice today, and we hope that they will be able to practice tomorrow. Later this week we will have them evaluated to see if they are healthy enough to play against Houston.”
“We’re looking ahead to Houston. We’re not worried about anything that Houston did or didn’t do in their first game. We’re most interested in what our team needs to do to get better. We can’t control the thoughts of their
team.? We can only control the thoughts of our players. We’re not concerned about what happened last year. We’re concerned about how this team needs to play, and how we need to prepare for this football game. What happened in the past will have no effect on the outcome of this game unless we allow it to.”
“Houston has a lot of good skilled players on offense, a coach that has been a head coach before, and who has put up some good numbers as a coach. They are returning a good defense. Their offense will be a little more wide open in its style than it was last season in terms of how they throw the football. That is going to be a challenge to us. Their quarterback is Jason McKenley. He has started a lot of football games. About 30 in his career, and he played very well last week against Rice.”